Thursday, February 25, 2016

Matrix #103 : Prose poetry

The
Invoking

Careful not to reveal
the words that confess what she is, busy twisting her ring thinking of the
scattered half-cocked passions of her teens. In the cleave of a myth her
forgetting opens the muscled sky.

It swells to release a
banshee wail and draw a sword against the sea. Strange literacies emerge from
the well of its throat. Here it is, she was empty for something and now it is
here. (Ashley-Elizabeth Best)

Maybe I read this, or
dreamt it, for my mind wanders as I age, but I have always believed Odysseus,
when he heard the sirens, was hearing the Odyssey
being sung, and in fear of being seduced by his own story he had himself bound.
And he was in even greater fear of hearing the end, for he could not bear the
possibility he might become someone other than who he was now, a war hero of
great courage and unexcelled strategy, trembling against the cords of his own
mast. Or he might become an even greater man, one without a single fear in the world,
one who would balk at a man having to tie himself up in fear of anything, and
then it would be revealed that the man he was now was actually a coward. Either
way, he felt doomed as he sailed past his own story. He sailed past the island,
he sailed past the sirens just as they were coming to the end, and once out of
earshot he did a strange thing, of which there is no record, the story having
ended in some far away sound which was no more distinguishable than an eye
dropped of sweetness in the vast and salty sea. (Mary Ruefle)

Over the years, prose
poetry has housed kooks like Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Charles
Baudelaire. What connects these poets is perhaps (too simply) possedoffèdness. Was
it just a matter of linebreakennui? Were they saving paper? What did the prose
poem once mean? (Especially today when it’s actually hard to find a poet who hasn’t
dabbled in the chunky realm). Well, once upon a time, the prose poem was
actually a political statement. (Not to say it can’t be now. One need look no
further than Rankine’s 2014 publication Citizen).
But in a day when reading poetry was a popular pastime (let me be clearer:
among the upper class), Baudelaire hurling his unrhymey bricks of prose
(discussing donkeys slouching down the mucky streets of Paris and the
hardworking-workingclass) was hardly a welcome blow for a fine fellow to receive.